Resistance and solidarity events

I've just learned that Seattle's Stranger keeps a calendar of resistance and solidarity events. Glancing at their list of events for the week ahead, I see a wide variety of things one can attend, ranging from marches (there's one this afternoon, and another later in the week for Black Lives Matter) to rallies ("Stand with Immigrants! An Emergency Protest", which is scheduled for Sunday afternoon) to shows ("Resist! A Show of Burlesque, Bellydance, and Punk Rock") to art exhibits ("Protect the Sacred: Native Artists for Standing Rock") to workshops ("Black Arists Lead: Creative Education for Liberation and Survival"), and much, much more (concerts, fundraisers, etc). If you live in the Seattle area, the link is: http://www.thestranger.com/events/resistance.

Are such calendars being kept in other cities? If you know of additional examples, please furnish a link to them in a comment. I'd love to be able to post other sources that this blog's readers can consult. Such events not only allow you to express your concerns and outrage at all  the injustice and damage and pain that the current administration in Washington is inflicting on the US and the world at large, they also feed your spirits, strengthen your hearts, and enlarge your imagination. (And sometimes even bring amazing insights to your understanding of the world you live in.) Resistance and solidarity are our hope for making a future we can stand to live in.

ETA:

For people in Portland, check out the Portland Mercury's page:  https://www.portlandmercury.com/events/resistances-and-rallies

Recommended Reading: Adrienne Rich's A Human Eye

When Delta stranded me in Madison after WisCon, I took advantage of my extra day there to buy an armload of books at a Room of One's Own. One of these was Adrienne Rich's A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008. After buying myself a pair of reading glasses (I'd somehow managed to lose the pair I had), I settled myself with coffee and a sandwich at Michelangelo's and plunged in. Since it strikes me that the first paragraph of the first essay-- "Thomas Avena's Dream of Order-- might be taken as the collection's emblem, I'll quote it:

Wherever I turn these days, I'm looking, as from the corner of my eye, for a certain kind of poetry whose balance of dread and beauty is equal to the chaotic negations that pursue us. Amid profiteering language, commoditizing of intimate emotions, and public misery, I want poems that embody-- make into flesh-- another principle. A complex, dialogic, coherent poetry to dissolve both complacency and despair.

There's much in this book about what art is, what it does, and why it matters. And there's a great deal about politics of various sorts. Frequently art and politics are too intertwined in her reflection to imagine ever separating. Take, for instance, "Jewish Days and Nights," which I happened to read only a couple of hours after hearing about the Israeli commando raid on the Gaza aid flotilla. "Every day in my life is a Jewish day, Rich begins. "Muted in my house of origins, Jewishness had a way of pressing up through the fissures. But only in my college-dormitory years did it become a continuous conversation, as Israel was declared a nation-state." (18) For Rich, a significant part of that Jewishness was her father's library, which shaped her intellectual and imaginative life from childhood. "When I think-- daily-- about American Jews and Israel, about Zionism and the Middle East, about intellectual and political life in this country and elsewhere, I start from there. A library. An attitude."(20) Rich continues her reflections by invoking the ethos and poetics of novelist Shulamith Haraven, a European-born Israeli, who as an artist calls herself a "Levantaine," which she characterizes thus:

Authentic Levantism means the third eye and the sixth sense. It is the keen sensitivity to "how," the knowledge that "how" is always more important than "what"; therefore every true artist is a kind of Levantine. It means a perpetual reading between the lines, both in human relations and in political pronouncements--an art no Israeli political leader has yet succeeded in acquiring....

Levantism....is the tacit knowledge that different nations live at different ages, and that age is culture, and that some nations are still adolescent, among them, quite often, Israel. And it is the bitter experience that knows that everything-- every revolution, every ideology-- has its human price, and there is always someone to pay it.

Rich identifies the sense of living differences that Haraven says the artist must be keenly aware of as at the heart of her own Jewishness. "Diaspora...means never always, or anywhere, being just like other Jews. It means class and cultural difference, dissension, contradiction, different languages and foods, living in different ages and relationships to tradition, world politics, and the "always/already" of anti-Semitism." (22) Rich wonders "if there has been anything more impoverishing to Jewish ethical and intellectual culture in the second half of the twentieth century than the idea of Jewish sameness, Jewish unanimity, marching under one tribal banner." She is particularly pained by the neocon redefining of antisemitism as a critique of Israel and the Occupation: "to reduce every question to anti-Semitism," she writes, "is to become infected with anti-Semitism's toxic spirit." (26)

Other essays in the collection engage with the work of Muriel Rukeyser, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, and other poets. A few of the essays aren't particularly about poetry, among them "Three Classics for New Readers: Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Che Guevara," which she wrote as a preface to Manifesto: Three Classic Essays on How to Change the World--Che Guevara, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. She begins

If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are disturbed as to how, by, and against whom wealth and political power is held and used, if you sense that there must be good reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wanting to act with others, to "do something," you have much in common with the writers of the three essays in Manifesto.(57)

She points out that all three were fairly young when they wrote their manifestos-- Marx 30, Luxemburg 27, and Che Guevara 37. Not surprising, I guess. A manifesto needs to be bold in issuing its clarion call, not tangled in qualifications and caveats and the intricate concerns that accumulate in the thinking mind, year after year.

They saw themselves not as "public intellectuals" or pundits but as witnesses and contributors to the growing consciousness of a class whose labor produced wealth and leisure for some but who did not share in it it-- a class more than capable of reason and enlightened action, if often lacking the education that could lead to political power....(59) Marx, Luxemburg, and Guevara were revolutionaries but they were not romantic. Their often poetic eloquence is grounded in study and critical analysis of human society and political economy for the earliest communistic arrangements of prehistory to the emergence of modern capitalism and imperialist wars. They did not idealize past societies or attempt to create marginal lifestyle communities but--beginning with Marx-- they scrutinized the ilusions of past and contemporary reformers, idealists and rebels, aware of how easy it can be for parties and leaders to lose momentum, drift off, and settle down within exising structures of power. (It is this kind of compromise that Luxemburg addresses in "Reform or Revolution.")(61-2)

As is often the case in her essays, Rich explicitly makes critical imagination key:

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life. Patience, open eyes, and critical imagination are required of both kinds of creativity. The writers gathered in Manifesto [Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Marx, & Che Guevara] all speak emotionally of the human condition, of human realization not as losing oneself within a mass collectivity but as a release from the numbed senses, the robotization of advancing capitalist society. Marx writes of "the complete emancipation of all the human qualities and senses [from the mere sense of having]....The eye has become a human, social object." Rosa Luxemburg speaks of "social happiness," of the mass strike as "creativity," of "freedom" as "no special privilege," and of "the love of every beautiful day" required to live in a world of struggle. And Che of the revolutionary as "moved by great feelings of love," though this might "seem ridiculous" in the cynical climate of bourgeois politics; of the need for a "new human being," created through responsible participation in a society in which everyone has a stake. (68)

One last quote, and then I'll stop. In "Permeable Membrane," Rich writes:

Poetic imagination or intuition is never merely unto itself, free-floating, or self-enclosed. It's radical, meaning root-tangled in the grit of human arrangements and relationships: how we are with each other.

If Rich's poetics speaks to you, this book is certainly one you'll want to read-- and read again. It's published by Norton and is now available in trade paperback. It's been a long, long time since Rich was "under 40." And it shows.

Tactics of Plausibility

The Winter 2008 issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society has a fascinating article on the activist art of Women on Waves, "Twelve Miles: Boundaries of the New Art/Activism" by Carrie Lambert-Beatty. Noting that "while political art represents political subject matter, activist art does politics," Lambert-Beatty cites Lucy Lippard's distinction ["Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power" (1984)]:

Although "political" and "activist" artists are often same people, "political" art tends to be socially concerned and "activist" art tends to be socially involved.... The former's work is a commentary or analysis, while the latter's art works within its context, with its audiences."

Women on Waves carries a portable gynecological clinic operated by two physicians and a nurse from port to port on a ship they rent with a largely female crew, flying the Dutch flag. The clinic is funded largely by the Mondriaan Foundation (a Dutch arts foundation dedicated to the visual arts and design):

In port it offers legal and medical workshops, sex education, and contraception; on the way out to sea it gives sonograms and counseling; and in international waters it provides the abortion pill to women who want it. Its missions have been controversial enough to earn its doctors and volunteers not only bombardment with eggs and paint but also court cases and even death threats; it was radical enough in its challenge to national sovereignty to move the Portuguese government to launch warships to protect its populace from the feminist invasion. As a result, Women on Waves has spurred debate on aboriton law where such debates had not occurred for years. Its visits galvanized the local groups of activists that invited the abortion boat to each country, and more such pro-choice groups were formed in its wake. A Polish government survey in 2003 found that popular support for liberalizing abortion law had gone up 12 percent in a year and cited the Women on Waves visit that summer as a source of the change.

Lambert-Beatty compares Women on Waves to the Yes Men. The Yes Men, in case you've forgotten, are those devious, ingenious parodists who create strange and wonderful moments in the corporate business of the day. They declare, on their website:

The Yes Men agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, ask questions, and then smuggle out the stories of their hijinks to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of business. In other words, the Yes Men are team players... but they play for the opposing team.

In 2004 the BBC mistook one of them for a spokesperson for Dow Chemical and broadcast the "breaking news" that Dow had decided to own up to its responsibility for Union Carbide's poisoning of the population of Bhopal and offer compensation to the multitude of victims (whose lives have been wrecked by Union Carbide's criminal negligence). The Yes Men provided a more frivolous moment in 2006 at the Catastrophic Loss Conference when claiming to represent Halliburton, they unveiled the "SurvivaBall":

"The SurvivaBall is designed to protect the corporate manager no matter what Mother Nature throws his or her way," said Fred Wolf, a Halliburton representative who spoke today at the Catastrophic Loss conference held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Amelia Island, Florida. "This technology is the only rational response to abrupt climate change," he said to an attentive and appreciative audience.

Here's where I think Lambert-Beatty's article gets really interesting:

To me there is still no more moving statement of faith in the revolutionary force of imagination than the one on the streets of Paris during the uprisings of 1968: "Under the cobblestones, the beach." But "twelve miles from the beach, the Netherlands," Women on Waves might respond, for the project is driven by a similar determination to replace what is with what could be. Instead of the 1960s vision of liberation, however, it imagines something concrete: a world in which women have access to safe and legal abortion no matter where they live. And instead of symbolically promoting change, the project's method is to make it so: to use maritime law and the concept of international waters to actually create--however temporarily and provisionally--the dreamed-of situation. This, the performative quality of Women on Waves, was captured in 2001 by critic Jennifer Allen. The project "does not thematise, represent, or illustrate the problem of abortion," she wrote, "it imposes a new geo-political reality that challenges [the] status quo in ways that cannot be fathomed, let alone controlled."

It is at this point that she makes the comparison to the Yes Men. After which she argues:

From one perspective, the opposition between the legalistic, earnest Women on Waves and the mischievous, hoaxing Yes Men is as complete as that between the genders in their names: as clear as the difference between real and virtual,between what one group calls campaigns and the other hijinks. [...] And yet, while they do not have the power to make real the changes they announce, the Yes Men nevertheless have real effects--on Dow's stock price that day in 2004, for example. And for its part, Women on Waves lists toward the unhappy performative more than one might think. For the fact is that two of the group's three campaigns to provide legal abortions were thoroughly thwarted. [...] And yet this does not mean the project failed--far from it...Indeed, its brilliance is in recognizing the special power of doing both [i.e., media politics and medical service] at once: of using bodily care to do representational work.

Lambert-Beatty describes this as "the politics or aesthetics of plausibility":

By providing opportunities for belief--however fleeting, and no matter how stymied--such tactics of plausibility provide especially rich, emotional experiences of "what-if." The art of the plausible works to edge an imagined state of affairs from the merely possible to the brink, at least, of the probable.

Lambert-Beatty insists that "the category of activist art starts from [the] belief that the aesthetic is not a retreat from the real but is in and of it." "Those of us who believe in a political and activist art," she says, "want to eat our cake and have it too."

We do not accept that art is an apolitical space apart from worldly pressures, and yet we want it to be a zone of special freedom. This is either an embarrassing lapse or, as Jacques Ranciere would suggest, a structuring paradox for political art today. According to Ranciere, there is a constant tension in modernity "between the logic of art that becomes life at the price of abolishing itself as art, and the logic of art that does politics on the explicit condition of not doing it at all." But consider a corollary: the possibility that the category of activist art is not just defined against but actively requires its nonactivist counterpart--it needs borders around art so that it might sail through them; or, so that, as Ranciere puts it, "the border be always there yet already crossed."

Lambert-Beatty concludes her article by discussing the "political unconscious" of the Women on Waves project, which is characterized as some critics as having colonialist undertones or by others as being meolilberal. All in all, it's a fascinating piece. Check it out if you get the chance.